New to OC completely

[MechE]

All new to this stuff, but so far it has been fun. I just built a new p/c from a bare case up and it works great. I have not overclocked it yet, been too busy. Here's what I have so far;
-Corsair Vengeance Series C70 Military Green Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Corsair H100i liquid cooling
Corsair Vengeance DDR3, 32 Gb
AMD FX-8350
XFX-R 7950 Ghost
Corsair HX1000W P.S.
ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0
Windows 7
1Tb Seagate HD
ASUS Wifi Card
and some other stuff

Any recommendations or warnings before I start messing with the voltage?

 

[Mandrake4565]

Meche, Welcome to the forums, you will be better served if you had this post moved to the Amd Cpu section, you will probably get more eyes on it there. What you should do is the following. Download Prime95, Cpu-Z and HWmonitor "non pro". Then run open HWmonitor and run Prime 95 at stock settings. I would do this for at least 20 minutes, this will give you a baseline of where your temps are and how much overclocking headroom you have. If you want to make sure your setup is stable at stock settings you can run prime for 2 hours, up to you. When you are done running prime post pics of Hwmonitor under load and the following tabs in cpu-z, cpu, spd and memory using the in forum attachment tool.

 

[trents]

To attach a pic with a post, first crop and save the pic to disk if it includes surrounding irrelevant desktop territory. In other words, we don’t want to see your whole desktop. That just shrinks down the important stuff we need to see so that it may not be legible. Snipping Tool in Windows Accessories is great for this. Then click on Go Advanced at the bottom of any new post window. When the advanced post window appears, click on the little paperclip tool at the top. This will load the file browser/up-link tool and the rest will be obvious. You can attach up to three pics per post but you can go back later and add more if necessary.

Your system has many great features but the one weak point possibly will prove to be the motherboard when it comes to getting a high overclock. It's a great motherboard and would handle high overclocks with most all AMD CPUs but when you get into the FX eight cores we find that the Sabertooth and Crosshair boards are the only ones by Asus that seem to be able to handle the high power draw of the Vishera eight cores when overclocking into the higher ranges. You should be fine to a certain point but all I'm saying is just keep your expectations reasonable. It probably won't get that CPU to 4.5 ghz but it may get it to 4.3.

Download the software that Mandrake outlined and check temps baseline voltages and frequencies as he explained. My only other recommendation at this point is that before you check baseline temps is to go into bios and disable all the power-saving, heat-limiting "green stuff" so that all the cores operate at the same speed and so that frequencies, core speed multipliers and voltages aren't dynamically manipulated under load. So disable Turbo Boost, Cool N Quiet, C1E, C6 and APM.

 

[MechE]

Wow, your replies are great. I'm going to get to downloading and see what I can get into. First, I'll try to move this post as suggested. Or has it already been moved?...

 

[RGone]

Aleady been moved.

 

[MechE]

Ok, running Prime95 and cpu has peaked at 54C. Good enough for the baseline? And where should I post pics of my test?

 

[trents]

Ok, running Prime95 and cpu has peaked at 54C. Good enough for the baseline? And where should I post pics of my test?

We need both CPU (socket) temps and core (package) temps to properly assess your temps. HWMonitor (non pro version) is the standard tool we use for this around here.

 

[trents]

Ok, running Prime95 and cpu has peaked at 54C. Good enough for the baseline? And where should I post pics of my test?

You add the pics as an attachment to your post, not as a link to some hosting website please. There is a built-in forum tool for doing this. I gave you instructions as to the process in my first post in the first paragraph. Please go back and read that. It's not rocket science.

 

[MechE]

Here's the pics

Here's what I have so far.

 

[Mandrake4565]

Ok this is what I see, judging from the difference between the cpu temp and package temp you do not have a fan on the right side of the case behind the motherboard. This is usually the case when I see a 20c difference between the temps. Your temperatures look good but you may run out of headroom with the cpu temp. We generally suggest staying below 70c on the cpu temp and 60 on the package. You are also running your ram at 1333mhz instead of 1600. You should go into the bios and set the ram to 1600 and set then set the timings to the XMP-1600 profile in the spd tab.

Have you shut off the power saving features that Trents spoke about in post #3? If so bump the cpu multiplier .5 and then run Prime again for 20 minutes, if you pass 20 min bump it again and repeat prime. Keep doing so until you lose a worker,freeze or bsod. When that happens drop the multiplier down .5 and run prime for 2 hours to see if it's stable there. If not drop the multi again and re run prime 2 hours. Just remember to keep the temps below 70 on the cpu and 60 on the package, if it goes over stop the test. What we are trying to do is find the highest stable OC for the cpu without raising the Cpu Voltage. Learning how to correctly overclock takes time and patience.

 

[MechE]

Dead on about the case not having a fan on the right. There is no place for it, but I'm beginning to think that perhaps I should find a way to get some air flow back there.

The pics I posted were as-is-factory-BIOS-settings. I wanted that baseline too. I went to turn off all of the power saving and auto-turbo stuff last night and did something very, very wrong. It took me 5-6 tries to get the comp to reboot. I changed everything (like memory speed and the multiplier but I did not try to exceed the 4.0GHz baseline) at once and I think that's where I went wrong. Tonight I will do it in a more stepped method and see if I can isolate what caused it to crash.

I ended up resetting the factory default BIOS settings and disconnecting all but my primary hard drive(drive priority got switched somehow) and that brought it back to life.

The ASUS UEFI BIOS is nice, but there are a lot of options that I don't know jack about.

 

[Mandrake4565]

This is a good read for you to get knowledge from. Let me stress a few things for you, 1 don't make more then one change at a time. 2 don't change the fsb to overclock yet, use the multiplier. The fsb will change the ht link, nb frequency and memory. this will lead to more frustration then it's worth for now. When you have more experience in the BIOS and with your setup then we'll travel down that road. 3 Take good notes of your changes, this will help you a lot. You will know what your last exact settings are and you will also learn how your setup responds to certain changes. Every system is different, even if it has the same exact components it can and usually will react differently. When you changed the memory speed and multiplier did you change the timings to the XMP-1600 profile? If you left the timings the way they were that is probably why you couldn't boot.

About the side fan, it is up to you, it isn't necessary but if the overclocking bug gets you you will probably want to push that set up.

 

[MechE]

Try Number two

This time I turned off the turbo boost, cool n quiet, c1e, c6, and the apm one at a time and it worked fine. Though I did notice an increase in boot time so it must have slowed it down a fair bit. I ran prime95 for at least 30 min so I could see what kind of fan speeds did what to the temps, some good info. No problems other then a decrease in speed.

I did not change the memory settings other then the speed. I was wondering about that...

Huge note, the package temp is off. Way off. It said 20C, the problem with that is my apt never gets that cold! When I fired it up to test ambient temp was 26C so it has got to be at least 10C off, but maybe closer to 20C.

Here are the stats of the new baseline with turbo stuff off.

I am going to try the memory again after this, see what happens.

Thanks for the link by the way, very informative stuff and I think it will go a long way in getting me started.

 

[Mandrake4565]

Way off. It said 20C, the problem with that is my apt never gets that cold! When I fired it up to test ambient temp was 26C so it has got to be at least 10C off

MechE I think you are the first new member to realize that the idle temperature couldn't be below what your ambient temps are. These the temperature sensors in these FX cpu's aren't accurate at idle this is one of the reasons why we ask for temps under load, they are supposedly more accurate under load.

 

[MechE]

Cool

MechE I think you are the first new member to realize that the idle temperature couldn't be below what your ambient temps are. These the temperature sensors in these FX cpu's aren't accurate at idle this is one of the reasons why we ask for temps under load, they are supposedly more accurate under load.

Good to know. That would explain the variances in temps that I have for my fan control programs.

I got the memory up to 802.7 MHz from 668.9 MHz, took a couple of tries but once I figured out the what settings to change it worked just fine. Same issues from the first attempt so I think you were correct about this being why I got the bsod.

Thanks again for all of the advise, it sure makes this a lot easier.

 

[MechE]

Finally had some time to play around with some settings. The "current" temps and values are with Prime at 20 minutes and a BAF pointed at the back of my MOBO. The max temps are same thing but without the BAF. What a difference.
I am curious to how far I can bump the voltage, as you can see I am at 4.3 GHz and 1.320 V and my CPU is peaking at 66C. I have not found the max multiplier for this voltage yet, I paused to see if I can find out what the safe temp limit is before I push it any more.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Also, what is +VDDA and why am I getting a warning about it being at 2.508 V?

 

[trents]

It would be a good idea to bump your RAM voltage from 1.5 to 1.55. We find that on AMD systems this often helps with stability as the XMP timing values in CPU-z SPD tab are generally geared to Intel CPUs and may be a little aggressive for AMD. Your CPU vcore at 1.356 max is still pretty low but your max CPU socket temps are almost at the top of the range we recommend. The effect of voltage increase on temps is more important than the actual vcore itself until you get pretty high in the vcore, like 1.55+.

I think it would be a good idea to run a longer Prime95 blend test (at least 2 hrs.) to confirm stability. You are getting into the overclock range for that CPU where things start to plateau and you want to make sure you are stable.

Hey, it's time you created a "Sig" so your system info travels with each post you make. Here's a script I keep on hand to help with that:

Please create a “Sig” so that your system information travels with every post you make. Component information listed in the body of a post early in a thread tends to get buried and lost as a thread gets longer. The “Sig” is a common courtesy to those entering the thread to help you. To create a “Sig”, click on Quick Links at the top of the page and then click on Create Signature. We like to see information about these components: CPU, CPU cooler make and model, RAM make and speed and amount, motherboard make and model, PSU make and wattage, video card make and model and last but not least, case make and model and information about the case fans (number of intake fans and exhaust fans and their sized, like 120 mm, 140 mm, 200 mm, etc.).

 

[storm-chaser]

What trents is saying is important. If your RAM does not have enough voltage, you may encounter BSODs or other reliability problems.

As to the timings being overly aggressive for AMD, not always the case. If you follow AMD and motherboard recommendations for specific memory compatibility, that event even has a slimmer chance of occurring.

 

[MechE]

Sweet, I'll create a sig when I get home from work. Also, the +VDDA spiked to just over 2.702 V, should I be concerned?

 

[MechE]

It probably won't get that CPU to 4.5 ghz but it may get it to 4.3.

I keep messing around with stuff and this is my best so far. Thanks again everybody for your advice and recommendations, this has been a lot of fun!